Thank you David

The MOONS team was saddened to hear of the recent death of David Sun, one of the key mechanical designers on the project. David had worked for many years at Cambridge University as part of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, contributing to many different astronomical projects for telescopes around the world.  David was involved with … Continue reading Thank you David

Half-way home

A 500th Fibre Positioning Unit (FPU) was recently installed on the MOONS focal plate. This represents a significant moment as we are now halfway to completion of building up this remarkable forest of 1000 fibre positioners. The image below captures the growing collection of positioners in all their glory. Half the focal plate filled with FPUs … Continue reading Half-way home

New year, new gratings

MOONS has taken delivery of the two high-resolution H-band VPH diffraction gratings. These beautiful looking gratings were manufactured by Kaiser Optical Systems, Inc.  in US and represent a remarkable technical achievement. Only a handful of such large gratings for these wavelengths and resolutions have ever been manufactured, and MOONS made the task even more challenging as its large … Continue reading New year, new gratings

Blue MOONS

The MOONS cryostat has arrived in Edinburgh – and it’s big. This is a key milestone for the project and allows much of the major assembly to really get under way. MOONS will be unique in providing wavelength coverage out to 1.8 microns, with a high multiplex. But this comes at a cost: to work … Continue reading Blue MOONS

Collimation

MOONS recently took delivery of two of the largest optical components in the instrument: the main collimator mirrors for each spectrograph manufactured by KiwiStar Optics in New Zealand. Last week a team from Arcetri Observatory, Florence came to Edinburgh to install these two large optics within the not-insignificantly sized mounting structures that they had designed for … Continue reading Collimation